On a Hoof and a Prayer by Polly Evans

Author:Polly Evans [Desmond Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2012-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

12

Before a Fall

AT IGUAZÚ’S AIRPORT elderly holidaymakers struggled with suitcases so large that, had one slotted three or four of them together, an undemanding family of four could quite possibly have set up home inside. Of course, what with their hernias and bad backs, these white-haired folk couldn’t actually lift their luggage, not even when wearing sensible soft-soled shoes. And so they dragged their reinforced, steel-plated blocks off the carousel and hauled them on wheels towards the exit, gaily bashing themselves, crashing into one another, and generally bludgeoning any poor fool who ventured within striking distance. Going on holiday, I reflected, must constitute a serious threat to these people’s health.

I was now in real tourist land. The morning following the polo I’d flown up to Iguazú in the far north-east where, amid torrid jungle and lashing white waterfalls, the Argentine border meets Brazil and Paraguay. The Iguazú falls are one of Argentina’s most spectacular attractions and are rewarded with a place on every sightseer’s agenda. I wasn’t just planning to visit the falls, though; I was intending to spend a few days up here so that I could travel deeper into the province of Misiones and see the ruins of two of the mission settlements that the Jesuits had built in the seventeenth century.

On this first day, though, I visited none of these wonders because, by the time I had escaped death-by-Samsonite in the airport arrivals hall and fled to my hostel in the tiny, sleepy town of Puerto Iguazú, there wasn’t a lot of the day left. Still, Puerto Iguazú seemed a charming little place. All the package tourists were securely stowed in the big, brash hotels on the road to the falls leaving the town itself laid back and quaint.

It was a one-storey kind of place. Tiny restaurants and pensiones straddled the rust-red road; the rich ochre of the soil contrasted dramatically with the vibrant emerald of the trees whose leaves glowed almost luminous beneath the fierce, subtropical sun. I wandered for an hour or so in an idle, Sunday-afternoon way along the rough cobbled roads and a short distance out of the village. There the settlement’s sleepy overtures to civilization were riotously outbid and the jungle ruled, a luxuriant forest of abundant green.

I strolled back into town past shops selling trinkets – T-shirts, balsa-wood toucans, and pottery figurines of gauchos sipping maté. Occasionally, a flat-faced bus painted yellow, red and blue loped by smearing brash shocks of colour onto this already florid scene. A few thirsty souls sat and sipped chilled beer at plastic tables under a white awning adorned with red, cursive lettering: ‘Pizzas. Hamburguesería. Pastas.’ I was warm after my walk in the searing sun, and I sat down to join them.

Nervous of the battering I might have to endure in the queue for the National Park the next morning, I got up at six-thirty, left my hostel shortly after seven and by seven twenty-five was safely on the first bus of the day to the falls.

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